Free The Bed Moved by Rebecca Schiff

his life outside the radius. He studies Mark Twain (his favorite Mark), the Impressionists, and a staggering amount of biology. He beds the women of Boston, Toronto, Tel Aviv, weds a woman of Rio de Janeiro, puts his children in a New Jersey school system. He films his children with a VHS camera. They’re in bathing suits. They’re going to visit Grandma Phyllis. Video cameras get smaller. Grandma Phyllis gets smaller. Then Mark’s life starts ending. This too gets filmed. The family’s in a fancy restaurant with a waterfall because why not? What are they saving it for? Someone films the waterfall.
    Phyllis belts, “Mark needs hospice care” into the phone to her daughter, brags about how she has correctly predicted organ failure before: Eugene’s colon, Bernice’s kidney. Now this. She remembers her sister Bernice on dialysis, Bernice gone, Bernice nothing. What luck to have a nephrologist in the family. What luck. Phone calls.
    The nephrologist is Phyllis’s daughter with the same red hair. She lives five minutes away from Phyllis for thirty years. A quick car ride in case of emergency. They know each other’s alarm codes. The alarms call the police. But that never happens. Nothing happens except Phyllis letting herself into her daughter’s house and punching the code before the end of thirty seconds. Phyllis has the keys.
    Phyllis can’t sleep. She keeps the radio on all night, watches musicals about riverboats, state fairs. She is having insomnia from the 1940s. She has lost a husband, a father, a sister, a son. Her mother, Elsie, is a story for another day. Elsie was a health-food nut before it was the custom, in addition to being regular nuts. She snacked on seeds and turned out to be right about red meat. Now Phyllis eats chocolate, only chocolate—chocolate-flavored rice cakes, chocolate éclairs, chocolate-shaped Freud (a gift from a patient), and she can’t sleep. At 4:30 a.m. she drives to Midtown, treads the elliptical, handles the lady weights, gossips about her grandchildren, the careers they refuse to have in spite of doing well in their respective school systems.
    Then Phyllis, too, dies. They run an obit in
Alive.
Personal trainers testify to her indomitable spirit.

F = m a
    THE WAY THEY CHEATED was with calculators. Half the questions on the tests came straight from the homework. One boy figured out the answers and put them in the other boys’ calculators in exchange for friendship. The boy who knew the answers was very short, almost as short as me, a short girl. He had to shave every day starting early, though—he was that kind of short. I’m the other kind, the kind that had to shave late. I did everything late. I’m still waiting for a lot of things to happen to me.
    The blind man lived near me. He was my neighbor. I would see him walking home in his suit and cane. He wasn’t totally blind. He could see a little bit. He graded our tests on a large-print screen. One letter, one number, took up the whole screen. I went into his office after I failed the first test and saw my answer up there on the screen, big and wrong.
    The boys would meet at the house of the boy who knew the answers, and they were all boys. I was the only girl in the class except for a girl who didn’t talk. The blind man thought I was the only girl in the class. He told me there were a lot of smart boys in that class and I would have to work extra hard to keep up, but I knew that there was only one smart boy in the class and he was giving the other boys the answers. So I left the blind man a note. I don’t know how he read it, if he had a magnifying glass or if his wife read it to him, but the next time we weren’t allowed to use those calculators.
    The boys who weren’t smart failed. They didn’t cry. They groaned boy groans and gave the smart boy a wedgie. He took the wedgie and went to MIT on a scholarship. I began to cheat using tiny scraps of paper. I made new friends.

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